Munich experimentation facility site

The Munich site for 5G tests and validation is located in the centre of Munich. A 5G base station (BS) is mounted at the rooftop of the main building of Technische Universität München (TU Munich) at a height of 25 metres, equipped with two sector antennas covering an angular range of 120° each. On terminal side, four (4) 5G mobile terminals are available that can move in the coverage are around the site at vehicular speeds up to 50 km/h, enabling to perform V2x drive tests as well as tests at pedestrian speed.

The 5G site is connected by an internet link supporting high data rates to the core network, which is operated at Huawei Munich Research Center (MRC) in the north-west of Munich, roughly at a distance of 4 km to the location of the 5G site. The core network provides SDN and NFV capabilities. The core network is further connected to a cloud data center, which is set up at the same location.

The BS site in Munich center is further equipped with a distributed data center for mobile edge computing, which allows to dynamically relocate the network functions of the core network to this distributed data center to facilitate short latency in the network for selected services, if required. The possibility of relocating network functions closer to the edge also allows the realization of a functional split, where the user plane functions are carried out locally at the site of the base station, while functions of the control plane are carried out in the core network at the distant location (Huawei MRC).

Summary of capabilities

5G RAN (Huawei) 3.5 GHz

5G Core (Huawei)

MANO and NFVI (Huawei)

SDN (Floodlight)

V2X

MEC

KPIs and Use Cases

The focus of the KPI’s will be low latency and high reliability. Throughput, location accuracy and energy efficiency may also be addressed, but optional.

The use case that will be the focus of investigation at the 5G-VINNI experimentation site in Munich is:

Urban V2X: Cars driving in the coverage area of the BS exchange information on their driving behaviour among each other by using network assisted V2V communication in the frequency bands owned by the mobile operators. To support driving manoeuvres and other road safety applications, different cars need to coordinate among each other. We also consider services for data exchange between the cars and the network. If the link between BS and a single car is obstructed, another car can cooperatively support the connection using the 5G NR sidelink in a smart way.

Architecture and Components of the Facility Site

The facility will comprise the following components:

5G Radio Access Network (RAN) at one site, with two sectors, each having

Carrier frequency: 3.4 GHz

Bandwidth: 40 MHz

Transmission power: 5 W

Antennas: up to 8

5G Mobile Terminals (MT)

5G Core network: HW/SW platform, where a prototype substrate, on top of which a 5G Core Network will be implemented and tested. The available HW/SW infrastructure includes:

Software: software networks related testbed, comprising extended network emulators (e.g., cluster Mininet with Docker extensions), controllers (e.g., Floodlight), open-source and proprietary switch implementations. Besides, Huawei has implemented an orchestrating platform for scenarios relevant to virtualization. Among other things, the testbed can deploy virtual networks with different topologies as needed. Virtual networks can be deployed across a server cluster. Nodes in our testbed are not simple switches, instead, they are compute containers (e.g. Docker) that run distributed agent programs to test/evaluate various proposed protocols. This is illustrated in the right part of the snapshot which depicts the console of a node in the network on the left.